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Monday, January 22, 2018

The Great & Beautiful Lost Kingdoms by William Dalryple

“People of distant places with diverse customs,” wrote a
Chinese Buddhist monk in the mid-seventh century, “generally designate
the land that they admire as India.”
Xuanzang was a
scholar, traveler, and translator. When he wrote these words in the
seventh century, he had just returned from an epic seventeen-year,
six-thousand-mile overland pilgrimage and manuscript-gathering
expedition to the great Indian centers of Buddhist learning. Buddhism by
then had been the established religion of most of South and Central
Asia since it was taken up by Emperor Ashoka in the third century BC, around three hundred years after the Buddha’s death in northern India. The account Xuanzang wrote of his journey, Buddhist Record of the Western World,
makes it clear that the places he passed through from western China to
the Hindu Kush were then very largely dominated by Indic ideas,
languages, and religions.